Photos deleted from the Photos App (permanently, I thought) years ago on an older Mac often show up in the Widget App on my current MacBook Pro. I have searched everywhere in the Photos app for these images but have not found them. I do not use iCloud so I do not think they were ever stored on iCloud. How do I find and delete them for good?
Running Tahoe 26.1 with an Apple M3 Pro chip on a 14" MacBook Pro.
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 26.1
Thank you, Richard.Taylor and léonie. You are kind to send your thoughtful replies to help me.
Last evening, I found the photos by fortuity. I was reading some Apple articles about the Photos app and came across a reference to multiple photo libraries.
I am embarrassed to say I forgot completely that I had created a second photo library years ago. I used to volunteer at a police department and was their non crime-related photographer for 21 years. Over all those years I had amassed a huge collection of portraits and event photos. And so to declutter and have more direct access to my personal photos I made a separate library for the departmental photos after deleting near duplicates and lesser quality images.
Somehow, though, the Photo widget was pulling half a dozen or so images from that old library rather than only from the one I currently use. And, to add to my mortification, I had not deleted those photos as I had thought. They were all right there to make my face turn red. So I highlighted them and pressed delete. That will hopefully take care of the issue. I still find it odd, though, that the widget selected those few images from that old library I have not used in a very long time.
Again, I thank each of you for taking your time to help.
Varien Tilton
Thank you, Richard.Taylor and léonie. You are kind to send your thoughtful replies to help me.
Last evening, I found the photos by fortuity. I was reading some Apple articles about the Photos app and came across a reference to multiple photo libraries.
I am embarrassed to say I forgot completely that I had created a second photo library years ago. I used to volunteer at a police department and was their non crime-related photographer for 21 years. Over all those years I had amassed a huge collection of portraits and event photos. And so to declutter and have more direct access to my personal photos I made a separate library for the departmental photos after deleting near duplicates and lesser quality images.
Somehow, though, the Photo widget was pulling half a dozen or so images from that old library rather than only from the one I currently use. And, to add to my mortification, I had not deleted those photos as I had thought. They were all right there to make my face turn red. So I highlighted them and pressed delete. That will hopefully take care of the issue. I still find it odd, though, that the widget selected those few images from that old library I have not used in a very long time.
Again, I thank each of you for taking your time to help.
Varien Tilton
That is a surprising solution. Thank you for letting us know. Great, that you could track the photos down.
The photo widget should only be able to access the photos from the system Photo library - the secondary libraries are not supposed to to be visible in the Media Browser. Did you make your current library your system photos library, when you set it up, or is still your old library the system photo library? You can check this in the Photos > Settings > General, while viewing your current main library. Is "Use as System Photos Library" dimmed, as it should be? If not, click it, to make this library your system photos library.
Ihtunp, if you are to be on photos, look for “recently deleted” and then type in your password.Then after you do that, you will be able to delete the photos for good. The picture is now shown below 😁😁
Thank you for replying, Samariazj80. I appreciate you taking time to help me. It is just a handful of photos out of several hundred in the original album that are showing up. The album the photos were in was deleted years ago (I thought) from a different Mac I owned before acquiring my current one. I looked in the Recently Deleted album in Photos but it is empty. I also looked in the Photos section of my iCloud account. It, too, is empty.
I clicked on one of the images when it came up in the widget hoping that would provide some location information, but all that did was open the Photos app to the All Albums link. I then did a search for all photos taken in the same year as the deleted ones but they did not show up.
In that the deleted photos followed along in the process of changing computers and do not appear anywhere in the Photos app or in iCloud, they must be stored in some obscure location. Any other ideas on where to look for them?
Weird! Seems like they’re not in Photos. You could do a Finder search for all pictures on your Mac
using period in the search field and adding, using the +, Kind as image. You can add more constraints like the date to narrow it down further.
let us know how it goes…
Some more ideas - the photo widget may have changed the file name of the photos, when it cached a copy of the image file. Then a search for the filename may not find it.
The images used by the photo widget will probably be copies of the original photos, stored in your user library. Most of the apps are caching their working copies in their sandbox in the user library, not necessarily in the Photos Library.
The current Photos widget is initially populated by the "Featured content".
A clean-install of the system should get rid of the cached photos in the user library, but that would be over the top. you could first try to erase the caches by selecting different content for the widgets.
Which photo widget are you using, btw.? The Photo widget I am using in Tahoe is revealing the photo in the Photos Library, when I click on the photo on the Desktop. Have you tried that? What happens, when you click on the photo on the Desktop?
How to Find and Delete Previously Deleted Photos?
